200. "Self-appointed"

"Self-appointed" is a put-down shot that wounds a lot of people, though it misses about 80% of the time.  Here's how to tell if you've actually been hit.

Say you're Mark Twain, saying some bad things about a beloved poem.  One of the poet's admirers calls you "a self-appointed literary critic."  You ask him, "Are literary critics appointed by somebody else?"  He has to answer, "No."  There is no official roster of those entitled to criticize poems.  Everybody's a literary critic.

So, for anybody who's not expected to be other-appointed, from Twitter scolds to serenity gurus, "self-appointed" is a clear miss.

On the other hand if you're an NGO busybody making unapproved peace gestures to a foreign government and the Secretary of State calls you "self-appointed" you've been hit dead center.  Only the SOS appoints government emissaries.

There are, of course, intermediate cases, where you lose some cloth, or get knicked, or even take one in a limb.  If you are Fidel Castro and get called by Henry Kissinger the "self-appointed leader of the [world] revolutionary struggle" (Memoirs III, 785) you'll probably have to bleed some.  Other third-world Marxists might be prompted to ask who appointed you.  But still, there's no official list. 

Requiring a list over-tightens the concept, which, loosened, is still useful.  Kissinger was uncomfortable with the word, as he showed in his next sentence, justifying it ("[Castro] was probably the most genuine revolutionary leader then in power") but he nevertheless used it.  Castro's self-appointment might well have been just a recognition of a fact — but still, Haile Mengistu over there in Ethiopia, and Josip Tito over there in Jugoslavia, nobody elected him, nobody put him ahead of you.  It's a bullet that will get some attention.

199. Embracing "Gay Marriage," Holding on to Socrates

 

"Old people can't reproduce themselves and they can 'marry.'" That does it.  There's no place left to go, traditionalists.  You had one argument left and Justice Kagan's counter-example destroys it.  Now you have to share your precious word.

Remember the argument?  "You can't have the same word unless you're the same in all relevant respects.  Ability to reproduce is relevant in marriage.  You can't reproduce.  You can't have the word." 

Then, boom, "neither can old people."  Traditionalists try to explain the counter-example away.  "We give old people the title 'married' the way we give honorary doctorates.  They didn't earn them but we want to show our respect for them."  It doesn't wash.  "All right, then, think of 'married' as an honorary title.  Can you withhold your respect?"

I, by age and upbringing a traditionalist, don't dispute that I will have to give up my position on the word "marriage," but I'm curious about how much else I will have to give up.  My position on "animal rights"?  I argued, in posts 27 and 79, that the word "rights," taken from the legal context that gave it its meaning, only disordered our concepts when we tried to apply it to animals.  We had to reconceive so many terms that depended on it — "contract," "obligation," "responsibility," all the terms, in fact, that referred to reciprocal relationships.

"Same-sex marriage" appeared to do the same thing.  The word "marriage" was so firmly fixed in one meaning ("the legal union of a man and a woman") that nobody, when they wrote laws and constitutions and devised ceremonies, even thought of man-man or woman-woman.  Add those and you had to reconceive a lot of other terms.   Like "adultery."  A wayward lesbian spouse can adulterate her marriage in the sense of introducing a spiritual or esthetic impurity into something pure, but she can't adulterate it in the sense lawmakers had foremost in mind: introducing a physical impurity into a blood line.  And "bastard."  A spouse in the old sense faced the problem of raising a bastard child.  Courts worried about the status of bastards.  I saw no equivalents in gay marriage.  Then there was "incest." Which equivalent relations would come under our marriage prohibitions, and be fueled by the ancient taboos that flowed into them?  Brother-brother?  Father-son?

Reconceive these words, that's what the traditionalist thinks he needs to do, but perhaps all he needs to do is refeel them.  Emotional adjustment, not intellectual adjustment.  The latter is easily accomplished.  All you do (and there are always plenty of quick-minded helpers) is redefine your words a little and expand your ideas slightly.  The former is, for traditionalists, not so easy.

Even if words are incontestably out of place, not all verbal dislocation is evidence of conceptual disorder, and not all that disorder is bad.  Comedians and poets live by dislocating words, and we join right in, laughing or crying.  It's not serious, or it's serious in a different way.

When you're classifying things, however, it's serious.  Socrates started us all off seriously, though he put his advice to his students, as so often, into a metaphor: "slice nature at her joints" (Phaedrus 265d-266a).  Let names end where bones end.  Careless namers are bad butchers.

Take Socrates' metaphor seriously and the merest reminder turns you serious.  Hear "verbal dislocation" and, thinking of a shoulder, you see bad things — something coming out of a socket, ligaments twisting, other bones wrenched down the line.  That's bad in nature, where bones break loose, but you know it's also bad, though less obviously, in language, where words break loose. 

I know, you can take Socrates’ metaphor so seriously that you turn into a schoolmarm, red-penciling every word that's even slightly out of place.  On TV now weathermen regularly speak of a "piece of energy."  Yesterday one said that "a piece is coming over the Rockies.  "No, young man," you say in his margin, "stuff is coming over the Rockies.  It can come in pieces.  Energy can't do that.  It's an attribute (or capacity, or quality).  Here it's an attribute of molecules, the stuff of the atmosphere you are talking about."

For me that's a classic case of verbal dislocation leading to conceptual disorder.  Say energy comes in pieces and you've confused your concepts of stuff and attributes.  You've weakened your ability to make clear distinctions. 

"All right, word dislocation is seriously harmful in scientific taxonomy, seriously harmful in the physics lab, seriously harmful in philosophy class, but in daily life?"

Daily life makes national life, especially in a democracy, and a citizen's assent to national decisions may depend on his understanding of a word.  Consider, if you are an American, the word "war."  You can assent to bombing and killing and exposing your young men to bombing and killing and to doing all the things you know they have to do when they go to war. That's part of your understanding of the word "war."  War is hell.  That, I think, was the understanding of the makers of the Constitution when they specified that only Congress could declare war.  They didn't want any sliding into hell.  But if a president moves the word "war" out and another one, like "police action," or "surgical strike," in, your country can do that.  Same bombing and killing of war but since he's called it something else you, having lost your word and obscured your concept and diminished your ability to make distinctions, will be less equipped to oppose that bombing and killing.  If he'd called it "war" you might not have given your assent.  That's serious as blood.

Though there are many cases where a composition teacher can take the oft-given advice to "lighten up," to "quit being so picky," and accept the innocuous substitution of one word for another, in the "war" case, and in cases approaching the seriousness of war, he cannot.  In the part of our national life that grows out of daily life it's clearly serious — or, if you prefer, "consequential."  It's consequential enough for him to take scientific taxonomy as a model.

"So he'd have us all be scientific taxonomists."

The only excuse for not being a scientific taxonomist in daily political life is time.  You can't carve a subject perfectly in the rush of events. But you don't have to butcher.  You can't make every word fit perfectly in a plea for help.  But you don't have to bawl.  Just a little care with the carving knife could, for example, have cut the spin off that expression "peace-keeping force" that Ronald Reagan used for the Marines he sent into Lebanon.  He (or his word-doctors) wanted people to think approvingly of peace, leaving out the force in the standard referents for the word "peacekeeper": hand guns, submachine guns, missiles, and armed vigilante groups, ready to keep the peace by, don't mention it, killing.  Then, instead of acting on the referential meaning he acted on the spin, and had his force just sit there peacefully — until his less confused enemy blew it up.  To the degree that American voters accepted this and drew no lessons from it for the next intervention they are deaf to Socrates and all taxonomists and composition teachers who speak for him — that is, they are lazy students.  If they get bloody chunks of meat and bone from deliberately bad butchers they have only themselves to blame.

It's a matter of dissecting-table habits.  Carelessness over the body of sports, or entertainment, or love, or legal relationships, inclines you to carelessness over the body of warfare.  Again a president, to rouse you against a nation he wants to war against, calls it "evil."  Unless you slice away that spin (recommended by one of his doctors for its "theological" cast) you are going to find yourself, and the Congressman guided by you, unable to make sensible compromises.  Only bad Christians compromise with evil.  The whole conceptual structure of international relationships has been wrenched around.

"As 'same-sex' wrenches around the conceptual structure of marital relationships?"

Just what I was getting around to.  "Same-sex" certainly removes from our minds a lot that the word "marriage" once put into it.  The sense of a socket-connection, for example, the one we think of when we "marry" the ends of hoses, is gone.  But whether that dislocation matters or not depends on what we gain by the dislocation.  Much as it might hurt an analytic philosopher to say so, conceptual disorder is not the worst sin in the world.  It's probably not as bad as hard-heartedness, or intellectual pride.  To avoid hardheartedness, to exhibit compassion, to convey good will, to reassure an excluded minority that we are one with them, that may well be more important than keeping all our words in order.

So "marriage" wins a position after "same-sex."  The analytic accountant would say that the social benefit outweighed the verbal cost.  His only complaint would be against those who, out of neglect or ideology, failed to enter a cost at all.  The logician would say, in view of the irremovable counter-example, that it was a necessary victory.  The Christian would see a demonstration that the force of brotherly love and compassion is greater than the force of intellect.  Christ over Socrates.

I am happy to go along — provided that my needs as a composition teacher in America are met.  Socrates has to be left with enough weight to help me sell students on verbal care and conceptual order, enough anyway to help keep their country out of unjustifiable wars.

Note: My self-published book, Today's Sex and Yesterday's Poetry: Readings from the Erotic Renaissance, is now available on Amazon and Kindle.  Author entry: H. R. Swardson.

198. Playing the Percentages: Baseball and Literature

 

In an earlier post (#195) a baseball fan wanted a key player on his team to shun his dying manager for fear a hug from him would affect his emotions enough to make him lose his poise at a possible key point in a possible key game in the race for the league pennant.  I have finally concluded — you've been waiting five weeks? — that this says something, not about human pathology, but about baseball.

It's that that fan has gotten so accustomed to playing the percentages — the enforced strategy in baseball— that he just can't stop.  You bat a left-handed hitter against a right-handed pitcher, walk the eighth-spot hitter to get to the pitcher, and position your third baseman close to the bag with a man on first in the ninth inning of a close game because most of the time it pays off.

Baseball teaches you to go for the 1% advantage (the "edge") you'll get 1% of the time.  Like with the catcher backing up first base, an example that tests the limits like no other.  In this play you're trying to make sure the runner doesn't go to second on a throw that gets through the first baseman.  Ball gets through, there he is. 

And how often does a ball get through?  I'd say less than three percent of the time.  And only when the throw is coming from the second baseman will the catcher have a chance of fielding it.  From any of the other three infield positions the angle of the throw would make it necessary for the catcher to get to first faster than the runner does.   He, the catcher, leaping up from his tiring squat, is not going to be able to do that.  Even if he were the fastest man on the team he couldn't do it.

So why in the world do you have this usually heavy-set, sometimes glue-footed, always over-worked, probably (after the sixth inning) pretty tired fellow snatch off his mask and, at the risk of stumbling over the discarded bat, dig like a fool for first base?   Because, inside that 3% chance of an overthrow from three of the four infield positions, is the chance that the ball it is mathematically senseless for him to try to intercept will, after it shoots past him, ricochet off the stands back toward him in a way that will let him hold the runner on first. 

How many times in a season is that going to happen?  Once, twice, maybe three times.  How many times in a game is that going to make a difference, one runner being on first rather than second?  How many games in a season are going to turn on that runner being there?  How many of those games are going to make a difference in the pennant race?  Figure all that in and you've cut the 3% chance that a back-up sprint will pay off down to something well under 1%.  After observing 75 years of ricochets I'd say it would be less than one-tenth of 1%.

Yet I still want my catchers to do it!  Why?  Because I want to win the pennant.  And I am not alone.   Catchers, because they want to win the pennant, want to do this too, and if they don't, managers, especially of college teams, make them do it.  If you don't see it happening so much in the major leagues it's because the managers have made a more refined calculation, based on closer observation.  The chance of the right ricochet is set against the chance of over-tiring the catcher, a factor in a long game.

Players adjust the odds as they go.  A catcher walking into a ballpark notes the distance of the stands from the foul line.  "No point in a back-up run here; I'll be too far for a throw even with the best ricochet."  He calculates his stamina.  "Thirteenth inning and I've been running my ass off down to first base?"  And of course the manager calculates the stamina and quickness of each catcher. 

All those percentages are tiny.  Yet a fan like me wants his players and manager to play them. That's the way you win pennants.  And I can't quit thinking that way when I see Fred Hutchinson approach Deron Johnson for a hug.  "If it reduces our chances of winning the pennant even by .005 percent, Deron, don't do it.  Get out of there."

I hope this makes my cry understandable, as I think it might be to a few fans in St. Louis and Philadelphia, and, come to think of it, to fans of literature.  Put one of them in the stands watching Doris Lessing in 1949.  He knows she's got some great work in her, and has made a start.  If she gets to London, and feeds on the minds there, the chances are it will come out.  If she stays in Africa with her two young children she will reduce those chances, probably by a very small amount.  The fan of literature sees her on the train platform, looking at their faces, reconsidering.  Will she, before she turns them over to their father, give them a last hug?  Does the fan want her to?  No more than I wanted Deron Johnson to hug Fred Hutchinson.  It would mean that he might not get The Golden Notebook.

197. What Is It About the Word "Marriage"?

  

 

Those holding out against same-sex marriage are down to the right to use a word.  Their last line of defense, that "you can't claim equality when you can't reproduce," broke down for most of them when Justice Kagan, answering a holdout spokesman, pointed out that old people, freely marrying, can't reproduce.  Reproduction is not relevant.  Gays, being the same in all other respects, are equal to straights and therefore deserve equal treatment before the law.

That resolution, though, doesn't seem to go very far in resolving the fight over equal use of the word "marriage."  Straights are as passionate in denying equality here as gays are in pushing for it.  Why is "marriage" so important?

Because it, I think, along with its fellows "husband" and "wife," has honorific force, the negative of which is shame force.  Not much force anymore, maybe, but enough to make gays want it and straights want to keep it.

It's one of those forces in words that we are so accustomed to that we hardly notice them.  Nobody ranks "husband" or "wife" up with the titles they have received, nobody declares it on a lapel pin.  But suppose "You left your wife?" was addressed to you.  Do you feel the force in the word "wife"?  If you don't, try a substitution: "You left your woman?"  If you don't feel the difference in force go further.  "You left your fiancée?  partner? girlfriend?"  What you're feeling is a shame force.

Here's where priests and ministers come in.  They, drawing on long traditions, are the experts in building up shame forces.  They know which ceremonies, which music, which dress, and especially, which words, will heap most honor on those entering a union.  They can add God's approval.  All of which prepares those getting the honor and approval to feel the most shame.  "You, husband, left your wife?"

And all of that works, or used to work, in the interest of society, which is usually to preserve unions.  And in the interest of nature, which selects for societies surest to pass on the species' genes, in whose interest we're all working.

"Marriage" now.  In the effort, at the altar, to give force to that word, religion and words work together, and you can hardly separate them.  "What God hath joined together let no man put asunder."  Asunder.  An oak tree split by lightning, an island broken to pieces by an earthquake, a country torn into gangs by civil war.  See what a big thing you're breaking up?  And what heroes those are who hold it together.

Is this force still needed?  Still relevant?  If you say it's not, your culture and class is different from the one that gave "marrige" its force, one where force on the man was vital to the welfare of the woman.  That's past, but even now, in the U. S., the future of less affluent women (and children) is settled by such forces.

The difference between "marriage" and "union" is that "marriage" has had time to become an honorific.  It may be slight but those who get the honor know what they have paid for it, and know, by the shame ("You left your wife?") what it costs to lose it.  A woman in danger of being abandoned knows what it is to have this edge on her man.  (You might try Googling "runaway husbands," "absent fathers," and "men abandoning pregnant women.")

Time, some Supreme Court Justices believe, is what the country needs to see how gay bonding works out.  And it's what word-watchers need.  Will the bonds we expect of gays turn out to be as strong as the bonds we expect of straights?  Will they be tested as the bonds of straights are tested, as by unwanted pregnancies?  Will gays show rights of possession to the old word?  Could they empower a new word?  We don't know yet.

Would that the battle for words could be fought without any depreciation of the capacity of gays and lesbians to meet the challenges of marriage, run the risks, and gain the benefits.  Would that their incapacity to run exactly the same risks (they can't be the same, since they never risk having an unwanted child) didn't make such a difference, and make it just where the honoric comes into play most urgently, with the male who has accidentally committed himself to children.

Is that such a great loss, a little of the pressure on a chafing male?  What's the harm in extending the use of the word that exerts it?  Especially when you're doing it with such good will, wanting to reassure, to compensate, to comfort a mistreated minority?  Who's really hurt?

I'll go along, but I would lose consistency in this blog if I did not say that the language is hurt.  I have already said that it's hurt when we are so concerned to reassure and comfort that we disqualify "discriminate" in the sense of "distinguish" and take every use to mean "distinguish with prejudice" (Post #8).  I have said that it's hurt when we disallow the word "better" in front of "culture" even when we mean, as fact, "better at" (#77).  And I've said that it's hurt when we take the word "rights" out of the context of reciprocal relationships within which the term has gotten its meaning and use it (as in "animal rights") to rhetorically enhance the flat expression we'd normally and accurately use (as, "animal claims on us").  That's verbal dislocation and it works to disorder our concepts, here the concept of "rights."

For years the word "marry," used for what humans do, fit and flowed with the word for what hoses do: join to each other physically in the most convenient way.  Male end to female end.  People felt that kind of connection beneath every higher use of the word "marriage."  They felt the practical convenience of that kind of fitting.  One bulb, one socket. They could believe that, if nature selects for convenience, that kind of mating was what the word, in the course of nature, had to refer to. 

But of course it doesn't have to.  Words change in meaning and extent of application.  That takes time, however.  And for this one there just hasn't been enough time.  As Justice Sotomayor said, we [the Court] let "society have more time to figure out its direction."  We "let issues perk," as we "let racial segregation perk for 50 years."  The same-sex marriage issue, she thought, had been percolating for "at most, four years."  Others would say longer, but not much longer.  In any case not nearly long enough for the language to be changed.